The background:
I once heard a linguistic purist railing about the phrase “making a decision.” His contention: One does not “make” a decision. “Making” implies creating it. You’re not “creating” it. You are simply choosing (i.e., “taking”) one option over another.
Eh. . . many words do have more than one meaning, and there are things called “idioms,” so that’s not really the question.
Anyway, I recently saw the Kubrick’s “Lolita,” and one phrase that stuck with me was where James Mason tells someone [my paraphrase] “Not every decision in this house is taken by the girl’s mother.”
The GQ: I’d say in the States, “making a decision” is by far the phrase more commonly used. “Taking a decision” is pretty uncommon in my experience. Is that situation reversed in the UK?
Nope.
I believe When a decision happens then it has been Made. The linguistic Purist is simply wrong. You can choose an option and in doing so make a decision. There is a decision where previously there wasn’t one, so it has been made.
I’ve only started hearing “take a decision” in the States fairly recently, and always in contexts where it was clearly a borrowed affectation from across the pond. In America we *make * decisions.
Don’t know where they’re borrowing it from then because i’ve never “taken” a decision in my life, and i can’t remember any of my friends and family ever having done so either.
I suspect it may be one of those things that some people in the US think is a Britishism and therefore use to make them sound clever but actually isn’t (or as, at best, laughably archaic).
A bit of googling shows that both “take the decision” and “took the decision” are both fairly commonly used in the UK - but mainly in political contexts. I certainly wouldn’t find it odd to hear a politician say, “we took the decision to stop kicking babies” as opposed to “we made the decision…”
Of course, “making decisions” is used widely over here as well. I wouldn’t say that one’s more common than the other, and I certainly wouldn’t be arrogant enough to suggest that either were wrong. But that’s just me.
OK, I saw UK-produced movie “Operation: Crossbow” a few days ago on TCM. The phrase *“taking a decision” appeared again. So far, it’s UK 2, USA 0. It looks like a trend, though possibly an obsolete one.
*Technically, it was in the passive in both this movie and the aforementioned “Lolita,” (". . . the decision was taken. . ."). Maybe it is/was a more common rendering in passive voice?
Am I a freak? “Taking a decision” sounds pretty normal to my (Scottish/British) ears. It has something to do with “to take” as in “select” or “choose”.
UK: I’d suggest that this is much more about a collaborative effort rather than an individual action. A committee reaches a decision, whereas a chairman makes one.
I saw “take a decision” all the time in the Times and The Economist when I was London, usually in a government or corporate context. Here in the U.S., never. It would seem an affectation or precious or even (gasp) twee.
My exposure to things British is predominantly the Economist, which I’ve been reading weekly for 15 years now. They seem to use “take” in all cases even if the people doing the deciding are Americans in America. I don’t believe I’ve ever noted anyone “making” a decision on their pages, regardless of nationality.
Conversely, I’ve never heard anyone in the USA use 'take" except a recently-arrived Brit expat or Indian. Sounded fine to me as long as their accent was thick enough to clearly hear the u in “colour” .
Although I don’t think I ever speak of ‘taking’ decisions myself, it does sound appropriate in the context of politics. Maybe you ‘make’ decisions for yourself, while someone could ‘take’ decisions on your behalf.
Color me surprised. I didn’t know that “taking a decision” was correct anywhere. I hear it all the time here in Montreal, from Francophones speaking English. I thought were using a calque of the French phrase, “prendre une décision”. Now I wonder if they’re using an old British form.
It’s also quite possible that the current British use of “take a decision” has been influenced by French. It’s certainly not the case that British English-speakers have always used “take” in that sense – the OED lists an instance of “make a decision” from Caxton in the late 15th century. Wm. Safire wrote one of his “Let’s Fulminate!”-type articles on just this topic a while back; I’ve pasted the link below (and apologies in advance if query-based links like that don’t work when pasted
– I didn’t now how else to incorporate it).
i think about that a lot and i came to the conclusion that people don’t make decisions, people are subject to fate and probability. they don’t “Take” a decision, they are “Given” one. they don’t “Make” a decision, they are “Allowed” one. think about it.
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